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Release
date:
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May 25, 2018
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Director:
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Abhishek Sharma
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Cast:
Language:
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John Abraham, Diana Penty, Boman Irani, Anuja Sathe Hindi
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1995: An earnest
young bureaucrat’s proposal to make India a nuclear state is mucked up in
execution by a minister anxious for personal glory.
When we meet Ashwath
Raina (John Abraham) again three years later, he is still disillusioned and
bitter about his suspension from his job for a politician’s mistakes. Raina has
been leading a quiet existence, taking private tuitions at home for IAS
aspirants while his astrophysicist wife Sushma pulls most of the weight for the
family that also includes their nine-year-old son Prahlad.
When life gives him
a second chance through the medium of Himanshu Shukla (Boman Irani), principal
secretary to then Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, Raina first hesitates
but then takes the challenge head on, becoming the head of an ultra-covert team
that goes on to conduct nuclear test explosions in May 1998 in Pokhran,
Rajasthan.
Raina is fictional.
The Pokhran operation, as newspaper archives attest, is not. Parmanu: The
Story of Pokhran recounts the events of that crucial episode in
contemporary Indian history.
This is a tricky
subject in this age of high-decibel, aggressive nationalism, and could have
gone unbearably overboard in the hands of a smarmy director trying to
ingratiate himself with the present right-wing government, especially
considering that India’s current ruling party also headed the regime under
which the Pokhran tests were conducted in 1998. Director Abhishek Sharma, best known for Tere Bin Laden, seems to be aiming at
least for a balanced tone. Instead of getting his
characters to spout hosannas to any particular political party, he leaves them
to do their work while the then PM’s stances and the international response to
the tests are conveyed purely through news video footage from back then of the
real-life players involved: Vajpayee, US President Bill Clinton, Pakistan PM
Nawaz Sharif and his predecessor Benazir Bhutto. Viewers are thus largely left
to interpret the proceedings as we wish.
Except for the
slimy minister who wronged Raina, Sharma also steers clear of maligning
Vajpayee’s Opposition, keeping them absent from the picture. Pakistan (a
favourite whipping boy of Bollywood) and the rest of the international
community are not lazily demonised either. US Intelligence officials do end up
looking stupid in the film, but what the heck, American commercial cinema trivialises
the rest of the world all the time, so a similar lack of nuance in the
portrayal of the US establishment in a commercial Indian film is worthy of a
chuckle and some forgiveness. So is the somewhat delusional description of
India’s post-Pokhran might in the closing text on screen. The clincher in
favour of Parmanu is that though
Sharma gives in to the temptation to speechify here and there about commitment
to the country, the point is not stretched and the film does not descend
into maudlin deshbhakti.
The result is a
reasonably effective thriller as Raina & Co race against time, the watchful
eye of US satellites and the fragility of Vajpayee’s coalition government to
conduct the explosions that made international news in 1998. True, the glaring amateurishness
of a couple of their moves on this most secret of missions is laughable. I
mean, c’mon, in an area packed with spies, six undercover operatives take on
the aliases Yudhishthir, Arjun, Bheem, Nakul, Sahdev and Krishna – can you be
more obvious than that? But pace compensates for these missteps which are, in
any case, not the norm with this bright, hardworking lot. The writers of Parmanu – Saiwyn Quadras, Sanyuktha
Chawla Shaikh and Sharma himself – also need to be commended for making the
conversations about the processes involved in their work sound comprehensible
yet believably intelligent to the average, inexpert viewer.
What could have
elevated this film to another level altogether, of course, would have been at
least an allusion to the perils of military aggression irrespective of the
perpetrator, rather than a celebration of weaponisation. Perhaps not wanting to
make his film cerebral in any
way, Sharma avoids any such discussion. Fair enough. If he had stuck to
a clinical account of the work done by Raina’s team (in the style of the recent Bollywood release Raid starring Ajay
Devgn), Parmanu could have still
risen above being merely passably entertaining. It does not because of a
needless string of songs jammed into the narrative. And then there is the
matter of John Abraham’s performance.
Abraham’s charm in
films all these years has come from his nice-guy vibe combined with incredible
sex appeal. What he gives us in Parmanu
is pared-down glamour, which is well-suited to this role, and a remarkable job
on Raina’s
look including what appears to be considerable weight loss and a toning down of
visible muscle bulk. For a hero whose shirtless scenes and unbelievably hot
body have been his USPs so far, no doubt these are brave choices to make, but
his expressionlessness from start to finish costs Parmanu dear. Abraham’s nice-guy vibe is still very much in
evidence here, but it is just not enough.
The rest of the cast are all good
with whatever little they are given to do. Anuja Sathe is both convincing and
likeable as Ashwath Raina’s neglected spouse. Diana
Penty, who was luminous in Cocktail
in 2012 and funny in Happy Bhag Jayegi,
deserves a larger role, but at least she is not treated as a sexy female
sidekick to a charismatic leading man as is the norm with similar Hollywood and
Bollywood films. Besides, there is a small thrill to be derived from the
presence in the story of a woman official from India’s IB who does not let it
pass that the hero expected a person in her position to be a man. Coming as
this does in a film in which the same hero’s wife is an astrophysicist, and the
writing team does not overtly pat themselves on the back for envisioning a
woman in such a profession (unlike most of their Bollywood colleagues for whom
feminism is a trend to be profited from, rather than genuine conviction), it is
hard to understand why they did not give the rest of their script the same
unobtrusive depth. What might have been can be a long discussion. What is is
the point here: Parmanu, with all its
faults, is moderately entertaining fare.
Rating
(out of five stars): **
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CBFC Rating (India):
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U
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Running time:
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129 minutes 32 seconds
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A version of this review has also been published on Firstpost:
Visuals
courtesy: (1) https://www.facebook.com/ParmanuTheMovie/
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